Genome games: A secret meet and a controversy
By Pete Shanks,
Deccan Chronicle
| 05. 22. 2016
On May 10, about 130 scientists, entrepreneurs and others held an invitation-only event at Harvard. Organisers told invitees not to talk to the press and not to discuss pending publications related to the topic they were there to discuss. Wait, what? Were they afraid of public panic? Was an asteroid on its way to destroy Earth? Was a catastrophic virus on the loose?
No, they were discussing future research, and how to get a lot more money for it. But they knew that if word got out people might be upset. Because they discussed building a completely synthetic version of a human genome. Not actually artificial people, but a huge step forward in synthetic biology. One of those invited, Drew Endy, a Stanford professor who is one of the leaders in the field, not only refused to come but tweeted: “If you need secrecy to discuss your proposed research (synthesizing a human genome) you are doing something wrong.”
Private water-cooler chat is certainly one way that ideas are developed. But over 100 people flown in from around the country —...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
